If you don’t know your Christmas carols, then you’d better run from Amy Poehler

Maybe it was stage fright wot caused it. If comedians Amy Poehler and Billy Eichner came charging up to you on the streets of New York dressed in Dickensian attire and demanded you sing Christmas carols on camera (well, offered you a dollar to do it), would you rise to the challenge or choke on that partridge in a pear tree?

The two ran around New York last week trying to find willing participants to sing along with their Christmas carols, and sadly, ended up keeping most of those dollars. For example, one poor guy could only belt out the first line of “Joy to the World,” and then another kept singing “Dashing through the no.” “Twelve days of Christmas?” Fuggedaboutit. Here’s the hilarious video:

Of course, this isn’t the first bit of proof that many of us are secret failures in the Christmas-carol department. (Mouthing along in church? You know who you are). Last month, Keith McMillen Instruments published the results of its quiz of more than 2,000 Americans about the top Christmas songs-gone-wrong that they’ve heard. The “Twelve days of Christmas” was the most misheard, winning 23% of the votes. It seems people stumble over that “colly bird,” thing. It’s not “calling bird,” but refers to a type of blackbird. Who knew?

Are we really expected to know these ancient yuletide terms? And for that matter, “bells on cocktails ring,” seems intrinsically more able to make your spirits brighter than “bells on bobtails ring.” Cocktails or some poor animal that’s had its tail bobbed? No contest.

Christmas carols aren’t the only songs where the words go wrong, and there’s even a name for misheard lyrics: “mondegreens,” according to Snopes.com, which cited American writer Syvlia Wright as coming up with the term in a 1954 Harper’s column. Snopes has a running collection of its own misheard holiday tunes from a collection of Internet sites and reader emails. Among these is the second line of “Hark! the Herald Angels sing”: “Glory to the newborn king,” is turned into “Glory to the New York king.” (New Yorkers, again.) And someone, somewhere actually thinks this is a line in “Silent Night”: “Stabbing fight, hold the knife.”

Another blooper from the Keith McMillen quiz, misheard by 14%, was “Deck the Halls”, which brings back memories of this holiday classic and “bows of fowry”:

“Frosty the Snowman” was messed up by 12% in that poll, and to this I can personally relate. I was recently teaching my five-year old how to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (another one that’s often mucked up). He’s had his own version of Frosty the Snowman down since last year. It goes like this: “Frosty the Snowman, was a scary happy soul…” Attempts to correct just sent him into a rage, so I decided it was cute and left it at that, and gave him free artistic license on Rudolph.

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